Chris Webby live at Crocks at NV in Thunder Bay, 8 May 2019

Three ticket pages went up for one Wednesday night, and C$280 separated the cheapest from the dearest. A general ticket for Chris Webby’s date on 8 May 2019 cost C$20. A Meet & Greet Package cost C$100, and an ALL ACCESS Pass Package cost C$300. Each level had its own page in the promoter’s shop, posted on 22 April.

Plainly, then: the C$20 ticket was entry to the show. The C$100 package was the middle rung, sold as a meet and greet, five times the base price. The C$300 pass sat at the top under the words All Access, at fifteen times the base. What either package contained beyond its name is not stated, so nothing is claimed for them here.

The room had a new address

Crocks at NV was the venue’s name after October 2018. Until then, shows ran at 16 Cumberland Street South. NetNewsLedger and CBC both reported the move: from 5 October 2018, events under the Crocks banner were held inside the NV Nightclub building at 228 Red River Road.

The last night on Cumberland Street was 29 September 2018, with Dear Rouge on the bill. The Webby date fell in the first spring the room ran under its new name.

NV runs its own dance parties every weekend, and the Crocks name sat on top of that arrangement. A Wednesday suits such a share, since the weekend was already spoken for. That is a reading of the calendar, not a reason anyone gave.

The month around it

Two days after Webby, Teenage Head played the same room, a Hamilton punk band with a catalogue going back to the 1970s. On 26 April came Dizzy Mystics, a Soundgarden and Tool tribute act. Three weeks before Webby there was a spoken-word night with Sabrina Benaim at Urban Abbey, a different room entirely.

Set against them, C$20 was a normal price. Across the fourteen priced shows of 2019 on this site, prices ran from C$10 to C$45. Only the packages went outside that range, and by a wide margin: the top pass cost more than six times the dearest ordinary ticket of the year.

Who Chris Webby was that spring

Chris Webby was born Christian Talcott Webster on 13 October 1988 in Norwalk, Connecticut, and went to Hofstra University on a scholarship. His first mixtape, The White Noise LP, came out in April 2009, and the single “La La La” caught on early through YouTube. He signed with the label eOne in 2013.

His album Chemically Imbalanced followed in October 2014, and the mixtape Webster’s Laboratory 2 in June 2016. By the time of the Thunder Bay date he had been releasing music for ten years, which is a long career for someone who was still only 30.

Wednesday is built into the catalogue.

From 2017 he released a new song every Wednesday under the tag #WebbyWednesday, and each December he gathered the year’s songs into a project: Wednesday in 2017, Next Wednesday on 19 December 2018, Wednesday After Next in December 2019.

The Thunder Bay date sat between the last two of those, less than five months after one and nearly eight before the other, and it fell on a Wednesday itself, which is either a coincidence or a very tidy piece of routing.

A rapper who had spent years feeding an online audience one song a week was now selling packages to that audience in a northern Ontario club, at a price ladder that reached C$300 for the people who wanted the most of the night.

A second visit

Webby came back to Thunder Bay four years later, on Monday 8 May 2023, at the NV Nightclub on Red River Road, on a tour called God of Tour 2023 with Ekoh, Anoyd and Justin Clancy.

The date was the same day of the month and the room was the same. Only the weekday had moved, from Wednesday to Monday. The building on Red River Road had by then been the home of these shows for more than four years.